Cousteau to explore 31 days of life on Florida's seafloor

June 19, 2013|By William E. Gibson, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Living in an undersea lab about the size of a school bus, explorer Fabien Cousteau and five fellow aquanauts will spend 31 continuous days submerged off the coast of South Florida this fall, riding around on an underwater vehicle and experiencing a month of life along the seafloor.

The research team plans to dive down 63 feet on Sept. 30 to climb inside the Aquarius, an "inner-space station" managed by Florida International University off the shores of Key Largo. Their mission: to study the impact of climate change and pollution in South Florida waters and test the psychological impact of living in the ocean depths.

The entire mission will be broadcast to scientists and students around the world 24 hours a day, with occasional TV reports on the Weather Channel.

"Not a small endeavor to be sure, but I never thought small," Cousteau, the grandson of famous French explorer Jacques Cousteau, said in an interview this week. "It's more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it's certainly a step almost into the sci-fi realm at this point."

Cousteau, 45, said he has been diving since his fourth birthday and exploring South Florida waters since his teenage years, marveling at the region's marine life. But he warned that its "underwater cities" — the teeming life around coral reefs — is threatened by offshore oil drilling and polluted runoff, especially from fertilizers and pesticides.

An environmental economist and filmmaker, Cousteau sees the 31 days of "saturation living" as a learning opportunity that calls worldwide attention to these concerns. It comes 50 years after a similar, 30-day experiment by his grandfather in the Red Sea in 1963, which proved that humans can live under water for a month without ill effects. That mission produced an Academy Award-winning documentary, "World Without Sun."

"During my grandfather's time, there was not the opportunity to do live broadcasting, sort of like a 'Big Brother' or 'Truman Show' type of environment where you have cameras all over the place," Cousteau said. "So the voyeur that is in all of us can peek in and join us, virtually speaking. We will allow the world to come with us on our daily ocean walks."

The researchers will experiment with specially designed helmets that allow them to take underwater photographs or videos by voice command and instantly upload them to the Internet.

Wearing scuba gear, they will travel around the sea floor aboard an underwater vehicle — which Cousteau said is like riding a motorcycle — in "saturation" dives lasting up to nine hours. And they will remotely control unmanned vehicles equipped with sensors one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, which can penetrate a coral polyp and measure acidity, a sign of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.

The aquanauts also will test their own mental and physical conditions. That includes checking their white blood cell counts and using applications on mobile devices to measure stress levels to determine how they are coping far from sunlight in a cramped and humid container measuring roughly 43 feet long and nine feet in diameter.

The Aquarius, owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, came to the Florida Keys in 1992. Federal budget cuts nearly scrapped the undersea lab last year, but FIU agreed to operate and manage it.

NOAA provided a $600,000 grant in January for basic maintenance, and FIU is raising funds from companies and organizations that support the research. The total cost for operating the lab is roughly $2 million per year, said Mike Heithaus, executive director of FIU's School of Environment, Arts and Society.

"This kind of mission captivates the imagination of kids and the public as nothing else can," Heithaus said.